Here's a question from my other thread (about genetic algorithms) that I've taken the liberty of reposting in order to reach a wider audience (because this doesn't require any knowledge of genetic ...

We think of random numbers as being somehow arbitrary and unknowable in advance. Mathematically, a given string of numbers is random if there is no shorter way to express the string than the string ...

RANDOMNESS IS A valuable commodity. Computer models of complex systems ranging from the weather to the stockmarket are voracious consumers of random numbers. Cryptography, too, relies heavily on ...